Berlin Stories - Books of a City

  • grimme

“Berlin Stories – Books of a City” sees Berlin through the eyes of literature – A character study of the capital based on the stories that were and will be written there.

Year

2014

Length

52 min

Directors

Simone Dobmeier and Torsten Striegnitz

Share

If the city, different from Paris or Vienna, is reinventing itself again and again, can it even leave a literary fingerprint with its great novels to “read its face”? Or does the literature of Berlin only consist of chronicles of phases, sensitivities and “moods”?

Witnesses are Franz Biberkopf, protagonist of the great Berlin novel “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, Herr Lehmann from Sven Regener’s West Berlin story of the same name and Paul and Paula, the East Berlin couple from Ulrich Plenzdorf’s “Legende vom Glück ohne Ende”.

What vision of Berlin do these characters convey? Does an image of the city consolidate? Or does Berlin’s literature consist of nothing but chronicles of stages and sensitivities of a city that is “condemned forever to becoming and never being”? Is there one big contemporary novel that manages to handle today’s Berlin with all its complexity? And can a city that keeps reinventing itself perpetually leave a literary fingerprint by which it can be grasped at all?

Written, directed and edited by
Simone Dobmeier
Torsten Striegnitz

Cinematography 
Kalle Dobrick
Axel Schneppat
Richard Sutcliffe
Torsten Schimmer
Falco Seliger

Sound
Falco Seliger
Thomas Funk

Music
Andreas Bick

Narrator
Anna Thalbach
Jutta Hoffmann
Simone von Zglinicki
Susanne Kliemsch
Chris Guse
Oliver Brod

Line Producer
Kathrin Isberner

Production Management
Nick Pastucha
Nico Erpel
Rainer Baumert (rbb)
Günter Thimm (rbb)

Produced by
Georg Tschurtschenthaler
Zora Nessl

Producer
Christian Beetz

Commissioning Editor
Dagmar Mielke (rbb)
Olaf Rosenberg (arte)

Berlin Stories – Books of a City
Trailer
  • „Just in diesem Moment überraschen uns die aus dem Theaterbereich stammenden jungen Regisseure Hans Block und Moritz Riesewieck mit einem erstaunlichen Dokumentarfilm, der seit Monaten Publikum und Kritik auf den wichtigsten Festivals der Welt elektrisiert. Völlig zu Recht: Es ist, als würden einem die Scheuklappen weggerissen, als sähe man das, was sich seit Jahren direkt vor unseren Augen abspielt, zum ersten Mal unverschleiert... eine fesselnde ,Doku noir' mit höchstem Anspruch...Dieser Film müsste an allen Schulen gezeigt werden.“
    Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
    17.05.2018

In co-production with

  • wdr

Produced by

  • Beetz
  • kobalt

In collaboration with

Produced by

  • bb
  • kublai
  • zeta

In co-production with

  • sky
  • zdf

In co-production with

  • rbb

In collaboration with

  • arte